2005 Election Results

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Explanation of tabulation

A more detailed explanation of the above results:

First, the basic premise of a "single transferable vote preferential system" is that every ballot (that isn't exhausted, see later) goes towards electing one person. That one person will be the highest ranked candidate on the ballot who was electable. Sometimes the candidate with the highest preference on the ballot has more votes than they needed to get elected, so the leftover fraction of that ballot will flow on to the next preference. (This fractional flow is the "Meek" variant, and except in trivial cases you need a computer to do it; in paper elections they redistribute by taking a random sample of the bits of paper.)

An explanation of the columns: "R" is simply the round number. The counting happens in a number of rounds as people get eliminated, elected, or votes get moved around. There are then 13 columns, one per candidate. It is purely a coincidence that in this case there are also 13 rounds needed to settle the election.

"Exhausted" is the number of ballots that have gone through all the candidates who were voted for, and still haven't elected anyone; these are now out of the running. For example, there was one person who voted for only one candidate; when that candidate got elected with more votes than were needed, the leftover fraction of this ballot became exhausted, because there were no more people listed on it to pass the fractional vote on to.

"Surplus" is how many (fractional) votes were left over after candidates who were already elected had all the votes they needed to be elected. These are the ones that go to their next preference in the next round.

"Threshold" is the number of votes needed to elect someone at this round. (More traditional people call this a "quota".) Initially, this is the number of ballots divided by the (number of seats plus 1), but it will gradually reduce as ballots get exhausted because there are less ballots remaining in the pool.

The threshold starts off as 21.9 votes, being 219/(9+1). If you get more than this many votes, you're elected. Five candidates did. Let's look at two of them in particular, though. First, Pat Wilson got 22 votes, just squeaking in to this round. Essentially, anyone who voted 1 for Pat has pretty much had their vote used up to get her elected. On the other hand, Geoff Halprin has lots more votes than he needs -- he got 47, but only needed 21.9. So, each of these votes has some "leftovers". Even though Geoff is now elected, a fraction (0.534 or so) of each of these votes have not yet been used. These partial votes will, in the next round, be shared out among the second preferences of the people who voted for Geoff (and similarly for the others who have been elected, even the .0045 leftover from each of Pat's votes).

All the leftover fractional votes from the 5 elected candidates have been moved over to their second preferences. The first thing to note is that the person who voted for only one candidate voted for one of the elected ones, so when it came time to move that vote over, it became "exhausted". This has the side effect of slightly lowering the threshold, as there are now less votes in play (the new threshold: (219 - .53) / (9 + 1) = 21.8). The second thing to note is that, not surprisingly, many of those second choices went to other people who were already elected -- by way of example, Pat's vote has significantly increased. But Pat (and the other four) have already been elected, so those fractional votes need to move over to other people too. Third, Doug Hughes has now exceeded the threshold for the first time, so he too is elected, and leftover fractions of votes for him (whether they voted for him first or second) now need to be re-distributed.

For the next four rounds, the redistribution process continues; every time a vote moves to someone who's already been elected, the fractional leftovers get transferred in the next round. The number of exhausted votes increases a little bit each time (some people voted for two, three, or four candidates), with a slight (not shown because of rounding) reduction in the threshold required. The "Surplus" must decrease in each round, as more and more votes come to rest in the bucket for a candidate who hasn't yet been elected. After round 6 this process can not make any more progress: The candidates elected so far have just over the needed number of votes and moving their fractional votes can't make enough difference to any unelected candidate to get them elected. So, we try something else. The lowest ranking remaining candidate now gets eliminated (sorry Steve Misrack), and his 3.7 full and partial votes get redistributed to their next preference.

Even all of Steve's votes still aren't enough to get anyone else elected, though. So, we eliminate the next lowest candidate, and redistribute Gabriel Krabbe's votes. Now, he had 3 full-power votes still unused from the first round, and they go to their second preferences. He also had a total of 4.2 partial votes gathered as second or subsequent preferences from other people. These need to be redistributed, and re-redistributed, until something interesting happens...

Still not enough votes in any unelected candidate's bucket, nor enough surplus to make a difference any more, so the lowest-ranking candidate (Matthew Barr) again gets eliminated. But redistributing other votes is, now, enough to get Chris Palmer elected.

Redistributing all of Matt's votes, remembering that he still has 6 full-power votes from round 1, and the small leftovers from Chris, is enough to push both Stephen Potter and Tom Perrine over the threshold. At this point, the seats are filled, the election is over, and Lorette Cheswick is implicitly eliminated.

If the election had been run as "Vote for one person, and the top nine get elected" (and assuming that the person ranked first is who would have got that vote), Matthew Barr would have been elected instead of Tom Perrine. If it had been run as "Vote for up to nine people" (as has been done in the past, and assuming again that the people would have been the up-to-nine top ranked on the ballot), the result would have been the same as the STV process. This isn't terribly surprising; the STV process is expected to be fairer to minorities in the face of party politics, and I couldn't really identify any parties in this election.

Greg Rose
Chair, SAGE Leadership Committee

Ballots

The ballots are available for public examination in the standard BLT format of the Electoral Reform Society.